During OTREC, the NSF/NCAR GV HIAPER flew forward, left, right, and downward facing digital cameras for in-flight image capture.

The forward camera is a Point Grey Research Hi-Res Flea Hi-Color, 1024x768 resolution. The Navitar DO-412 lens has a focal length of 4 mm and the field of view is about 62 x 48 degrees with some barrel distortion. This camera is located on the right wing pylon.

The left-facing camera is a Point Grey Research Scorpion SCOR-20SO - Color, 1600 x 1200 resolution resolution equipped with an Edmund Optics 6mm lens (#67-709). The field of view is 75 x 54 degrees with approximately 7% barrel distortion.

The right-facing camera is a Point Grey Research Flea 3 (FL3-FW-14S3C-C) - Color, 1280 x 960 resolution equipped with an Edmund Optics 6mm lens (#67-709). The field of view is 68 x 51 degrees with approximately 6% barrel distortion. 

The downward-facing camera is a Allied Scientific ProSilica GT4907 monochrome camera with Zeiss ZF.2 100mm F/2 lens. Field of view is 20 x 15 degree. For OTREC the camera was mounted so that the long dimension is fore-aft to the plane. Most downward-facing images were taken with 3x3 binning giving a resolution of 1620 x 1076 pixels. The images tend to be much larger than the forward/side images because of greater detail on the ground compared to the sky/clouds. (The exception being when flying above thick clouds and when the window iced up. These images are very small, ~10 kB) 

Images were acquired once per second and stored as JPEG-compressed files. No image processing was performed beyond converting the raw pixel data to 24 bit color images. Applying a sharpening filter as is ordinarily done by consumer digital cameras will considerably improve the appearance. The UTC date and time are encoded in the filename as YYMMDD-HHMMSS.jpg.

Test Flights:

Only sent images are available for TF04.

Ferry Flights:

On the return ferry flight (FF04) the native resolution of 3232 x 4864 pixels was used so the downward images are up to 2 MB each.

Please direct any questions to:

Stuart Beaton or Taylor Thomas

NCAR/EOL/RAF